Baja Florida (5 page)

The address Maria gave me belonged to a house way out near the Redlands. Forty-five minutes west to Homestead and then north, along the edge of the Everglades, an edge that kept getting pushed back and back and back. Zero-lot line homes and spec developments gave way to plant nurseries, small farms, and houses that sat on five-acre tracts.

I drove down a long lime-rock driveway that led to a small concrete-block house. Might have once been a bright shade of yellow, now faded to a cheerless off-white. Brown minivan parked outside, cardboard duct-taped where a rear window used to be. Mango and avocado seedlings studded the backyard, but it looked like whoever planted them had given up on the trees ever bearing fruit. The garage was crammed full of boxes and furniture—the belongings of people who were either moving out or who had never really moved in.

I got out of the car. Boggy stayed put. Still doing his not-really-napping thing.

“You coming?”

No answer.

“Good thing I brought you along,” I said.

I walked up to the house and rang the doorbell. Inside, a dog barked. Tiny dog by the sound of it.

A woman's voice said, “Tico, stop it. Stop it right now…”

The door opened. A reddish brown furball lunged forward and froze at the threshold yapping away.

“Tico, I told you…”

The woman was short and just this side of plump. She wore a baggy T-shirt and baggy sweatpants, thinking maybe the plumpness wouldn't show. She gave the dog the side of her foot, not so hard as to hurt it, but hard enough to make it scoot out of the doorway and stop yapping.

The woman carried a child on one hip, a little boy about two. Behind her I could see a little girl, maybe four, sitting on a sofa watching TV. It was turned up too loud.

The woman wore the wary look of someone who every time she opens the door expects to get more bad news. Still, she forced a smile. Not much hope in it, but at least a try. Who knew? I might be that Publishers Clearing House guy.

“Yes?”

“Looking for Abel Delgado.”

The little bit of hope vanished. The woman looked at the ground by my feet.

“Are you Mrs. Delgado?”

She looked at me.

“For now,” she said.

She turned and put the little boy in a playpen. She told the little girl to look after her brother while Mommy went outside for a minute.

She stood on the top step, gathering her frizzy brown hair in a ponytail and wrapping a pink scrunchy around it.

“I don't like to talk about Abel in front of the kids.” She shrugged. “I mean, he's still their father no matter what.”

I nodded.

“I served him the papers three months ago. Told him to move out. Finally had to get a restraining order. I don't know where he has been staying since then. Divorce isn't official yet. He and his lawyer have been postponing things. Abel keeps saying he wants to give it another try.” She shook her head. “I'm about tried out.”

“When was the last time you heard from him?”

She tilted her head, eyes narrowed.

“You a cop or something?”

“Do I look like a cop?”

She gave me the once-over.

“Better shape than most of them.”

I smiled.

“I'll take my compliments where I can get them.”

“Not that big a compliment,” she said. “Most cops I know are lard asses. Abel, he used to be a cop.”

“I'm not a cop.”

“So what are you then?”

“Just someone who wants to find your ex-husband.”

“He owe you money?”

“Nope.”

She gave it some consideration. I gave her another smile.

“Because if Abel owes you money it is really not in my best interest to help you find him. You understand? Because if you get money from him then that is less money he has to give me and the kids. And I could use what ever he's got right now. He's paying the mortage and far as I know that's current. But I've got other bills long past due. Lots of them. Plus we have to eat.”

Tears puddling in her eyes.

“His idea to quit the department, go out on his own. There went the health insurance. There went a regular paycheck. His idea to rent space in some fancy office building he couldn't afford. But that's Abel. He says it's thinking big. I say it's getting in over his head. And where has it gotten us? Where?”

She was sobbing now. She sat down on the steps and buried her face in her arms.

The little girl appeared behind a screen window and looked out at her mother.

“It's OK,” I told the little girl. “You can go sit down.”

But she kept standing there, her eyes going back and forth between her mother and me.

The woman wiped her face with the back of a hand, tried to compose herself.

“Sorry,” she said.

“It's alright.”

“Sometimes it just gets more than I can take and I explode.”

“Good to do that,” I said.

She let out some air.

“Look, Mrs. Delgado, I don't want any money from your husband. I just want some information. He's been looking for the daughter of a friend of mine and I need to find out what he knows about her. That's all.”

She looked up at me.

“The rich girl?” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“The last time I spoke with Abel, he called to say some rich girl's father had hired him to look for her. He sounded all excited about it. He said…”

She stopped.

“He said what?”

She looked away.

“He just said when it was all over he'd have money and everything would be good again.”

“When was this?”

“I don't know, two or three days ago.”

“You know where he was calling from?”

“Some bar in the Bahamas. He'd been drinking. That was part of the problem. He'd been drinking. A lot.”

“He say where in the Bahamas?”

She shrugged.

“Might have, I don't know. Just the Bahamas. That's the part I remember. We were supposed to go on a cruise there last fall. Didn't happen.”

“You have a cell-phone number for him?”

“Yes.”

She recited it and I jotted it down.

“Mommy…”

The little girl was still at the window.

“Yes, honey. What is it?”

“Ricky spit up, Mommy.”

“OK, honey. I'll be right there.”

She pulled herself to her feet.

“Duty calls,” she said.

I reached in my wallet, pulled out three hundred-dollar bills. I handed them to her. She looked at the money, then at me.

“What's this for?”

I gave her my card.

“If you hear from your husband again, give me a call.”

“I can't take this money.”

“Sure you can,” I said. “Thanks for your help, Mrs. Delgado.”

She looked at the money. She looked at me. She stuck out a hand.

“I'm Gloria,” she said.

We needed a place to spend the night, so I got us a two-bedroom suite at the Mutiny Hotel. Came with a balcony looking out on the bay and the boats anchored around Dinner Key.

There are swanker hotels in Coconut Grove. But the Mutiny enjoys a notoriety that trumps its five-star neighbors and endears it to me.

Back in the day, it was the hangout for the
Miami Vice
crowd before there was a
Miami Vice.
Bad hair, pastel sport coats, cocaine cowboys, and plenty of stories about guests finding bundles of twenties stashed under mattresses by previous tenants who were either too fried to notice or in one giant hurry to get the hell out of Dodge City on the Biscayne.

A little ahead of my time. Still, I felt a certain kinship to the era if only for the fact that I occasionally found myself in the position of having to stash money in places where I hoped it wouldn't be found. The money had come my way via circumstances that, while wholly honorable, were not, by strict definition, legal. Money acquired for services rendered. Money that would take some explaining. Far be it from me to strain the resources of the good and overburdened people who work for the IRS. Better that they should pursue those who acquire their money by dishonorable means. So, to make it easier on both of us, my mattress of choice was currently a bank in Bermuda. A nice little pile of money. I didn't play with it. No sheltered investments or real estate schemes. Just money sitting around, drawing very little interest, but there if I needed it. I thought about it sometimes, fondly, but not so much that it consumed me. Otherwise, it was money not worth having.

No sooner had the bellboy delivered us to our suite than Boggy went into his room and closed the door. Mr. Sociable.

Another way the Mutiny endeared itself to me: It didn't have minibars. I hate minibars. Minibars are the scourge of a gracious hotel experience. The very name—minibar—diminishes the entire expansive notion of imbibing.

So I happily called room service and ordered two bottles of Heineken, cashew nuts, and some extra sharp cheddar cheese. After it was delivered—with a proper flourish, on a tray, with a starched white napkin and a tiny orchid in a bud vase—I sat on the balcony and snacked and drank beer and tried to sort out where things stood.

I needed to get Boggy and myself to the Bahamas, find Jen Ryser, put us all on her father's yacht in Nassau and take us down to Lady Cut Cay. A straightforward enough proposition.

Getting to the Bahamas was the easy part. A pilot buddy, Charlie Callahan, was on standby, just waiting for my call. And I'd already contacted the shipyard in Nassau. Mickey Ryser's yacht was ready to go.

But where, oh where, could Jen Ryser be?

To find someone, it helps if you actually know a little something about that someone. And I knew precious little about Jen Ryser. Not much other than her name, really. I knew that she had graduated from the College of Charleston, bought a sailboat, enlisted some friends to join her on a cruise through the islands, and set off first for the Bahamas. I didn't know exactly where in the Bahamas. I didn't know what kind of sailboat it was, nor its name. I didn't know how many friends were on board, nor their names. I didn't even know what Jen Ryser looked like or how to describe her to anyone who might have seen her. I didn't have a photograph of her. That's because Mickey Ryser didn't have a photograph of her. He hadn't laid eyes on her in more than twenty years. He didn't know what color her hair was, what color her eyes were, how tall she was, how much she weighed. She was just a voice on the phone to him. And he to her. And it was up to me to connect the two of them after all these years so they could have their father-and-daughter reunion. And then Mickey was going to die.

I opened the second Heineken, finished off the cashews.

I called around and got the number for the main Bahamas customs and immigration office in Nassau. I spoke to a clerk and then the clerk's supervisor and then the supervisor's supervisor, all of whom told me what I already knew: Under no circumstances could they give out information about who had entered the country to private citizens such as myself.

“I could have lied and told you I was Homeland Security,” I told the supervisor's supervisor.

“Good day, sir,” she told me.

I called the U.S. Embassy in Nassau. I eventually spoke with a young man who tried his best not to sound bored as he asked me questions.

“Has the person you are looking for officially been declared missing?”

“No,” I said.

“Have you specific reason or evidence to suspect foul play?”

“No,” I said.

“Are you among this person's immediate family?”

“No,” I said. “But I represent the father.”

“Are you an attorney?”

“No,” I said. “Just a friend.”

“Hmm, I see,” said the young man.

Cut to the chase: Not a damn thing he could or would do for me.

I thought maybe I should double my plan of attack. Maybe I should also set my sights on finding Abel Delgado. Maybe I could throw some green incentive at Strecker, the kid lawyer, and get him to help me locate his client.

Gloria Delgado telling me,
“He said when it was all over he'd have money…”

That could mean Delgado had succeeded in finding Jen Ryser and was trying to leverage it for more serious coinage. Or it could just as easily mean that he was barhopping his way around the Bahamas and living life large until the ten-thousand-dollar retainer was all gone. At which point, he would call Mickey Ryser and try to extract a little more. Meanwhile, his soon-to-be-ex-wife and his two kids were sitting in a crummy crackerbox house way out in the Redlands, watching TV on a sofa with no idea where life was leading them.

I sipped Heineken. I ate the last slice of cheese.

I thought about the Bahamas.

It might seem like a small place, just specks on the map. In total land area, it's only about the size of dinky little Connecticut. But that land is spread out over more than three thousand islands, cays, and islets, only about seventy of which are inhabited. And the entire archipelago, stem to stern, stretches nearly eight hundred miles, like the drive from San Francisco to Seattle.

Baja Florida, I call it.

Once you're over the border, no one asks too many questions. A little money, you can hole up, be anyone you want to be.

Drift here, drift there. A lot of territory.

And plenty of places to hide.

“She musta really got you worked up, huh?”

“You complaining?”

“Not at all. I've been itching for you, baby. It's been too long.”

“Just a couple of weeks.”

“But all that time I had to watch the two of you, going on like you did. You know what that was like?”

“I had to do some watching, too.”

“Yeah, but you could tell I wasn't enjoying it.”

“You faked it pretty good then.”

“We both did.”

“That's what we do.”

“Still…”

“Still what?”

“I don't know. I just keep thinking maybe we should have kept it simple. Like before. Take the boat, get some money, disappear. Now we've got her to worry about.”

“Opportunity comes along, you grab it.”

“Maybe we tried to grab too much. Maybe we should just get rid of her.”

“Trust me, it'll work.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“Because I've got confidence in you.”

“Yeah?”

“You and me, we're a team. We're gonna pull this off.”

“And then what?”

“You know. We talked about it.”

“Tell me again. I like to hear you say it.”

“And then we're set. We can live the life. Do anything we want to do, go anywhere we want to go.”

“Argentina?”

“If you want. Yeah, sure. Argentina.”

“Money can go a long way there.”

“What I've heard, too.”

“South Africa. I always wanted to go on a safari. Wouldn't that be cool?”

“Yeah, wherever.”

“You don't like South Africa?”

“Let's get this over with first, OK? Then we can talk about the rest. Lots of things still have to fall in place.”

“We need some food, some other stuff.”

“I'll go into town this evening.”

“Can I come, too?”

“No, you're staying here.”

“But I'm going crazy, just sitting around.”

“We can't leave her here alone, you know that.”

“How long will you be gone?”

“I don't know. Not long. I need to find an ATM, see if the bank card works.”

“What if it doesn't?”

“Then she's got a problem. A big problem…”